William Harris, 56, a post systems analyst at Cleveland’s Palmer-Inge, was dismissed this week when it was discovered he had done no work since being hired 13 years ago – despite typing frantically at his computer for 12 hours a day, on average.
The situation came to light when he punched the wrong key and accidentally e-mailed one day’s worth of typing to the entire company. The document contained one sentence – “A man with a zebra played the xylophone in Quincy” – typed 6,934 times.
A check of his digital history revealed he’d done the same thing every day since his hiring, for a total of 16,593,443 identical sentences typed.
“He claimed that when he first started nobody gave him assignments and after awhile he quit asking,” says a company source. “Apparently he needed the job and didn’t want anyone to find out he had nothing to do, so he decided to just type gibberish.”
For a long time, it appeared to work. Harris was almost universally perceived as a hard-worker and rising star – coming in early, skipping lunch, and rarely using the restroom as he typed away. Over the years he’d received the monthly Go-Getter award six different times, and in 2009 was invited to sit directly behind CEO Cleo Parkman at her annual What’s Happenin’! presentation.
“He appeared to be working so hard that a lot of people would tell him to go easier on himself,” says the source. “He’d just shake his head and say he had too much to do.”
To prevent such an occurrence from happening again, Palmer-Inge has installed the new Mortonsen IV (bg9) software, which automatically detects identical sentences that are typed more than 10,000 times.
